Guilt is what separates humans from animals.

That is supposed to be the rallying cry of women in the age of AIDS: no condom, no sex. But the dirty little secret is that the rallying cry is a whisper.... The great unspoken on the heterosexual AIDS front has been how behavior is still determined by the old psychosexual minuet of the sexes, the lack of responsibility in young men and of assertiveness in young women.

Ever since the Evil Empire turned out to be a collection of third-world countries, Americans aligned on the far right have tried to cast gay men and lesbians as the new enemy, calculating deviants seducing the nation's young, anti-Avon ladies selling sodomy door-to-door. This simply won't wash. Just as seeing the Russians up close and personal on television humanized them, so seeing the lesbian grandmother of two little girls wearing her gold medal with pride makes the notion of otherness, much less deviance, silly and ignorant.

Today is the only guarantee you get.

There is a lot of talk now about metal detectors and gun control. Both are good things. But they are no more a solution than forks and spoons are a solution to world hunger.

I think there are some stories that need to be told by a specific person as opposed to in the third person.

Sometimes change came all at once, with a sound like a fire taking hold of dry wood and paper, with a roar that rose around you so you couldn't hear yourself think. And then, when the roar died down, even when the fires were damped, everything was different.